The venerable daytime drama Guiding Light is finally going dark, ending an unprecedented run that predated television. The program began during the Magdalanian Age as a cave painting about a shaman named Ork and the day-to-day troubles of his clan. Around 1500 B.C. the show made of the first of its many pioneering moves to new media, when it transitioned out of caves and into frescoes. Simultaneously, in an effort to capture a more hip, urban, city-state demographic, the storylines began to focus less on rural issues like hunting and gathering, and more on popular youth trends, like incest, and leaping over the backs of bulls.
Around 600 B.C. the producers worried the show was becoming static, and shook things up by shifting to the then nascent technology of choral dithyrambs. The stories began to revolve around a powerful family of amphora merchants, and critics note that even in its early days, Guiding Light was known for taking on hot button social issues, such as the debate over chaste or erotic pederasty. In the Middle Ages the producers again broke new ground by having their actors speak in the vulgate, and by not naming each and every character “Everyman,” while during the Restoration, Guiding Light was the first soap opera to cast women as the female characters.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the producers struggled to build on their earlier successes with emerging media, but efforts to broadcast the show via navy semaphore flags, and later, by telegraph, were considered little more than interesting novelties. Attempts were made to present the program’s complex, multi-character storylines as unfunny wood engravings in Punch, and later, as blackface minstrels shows, but these failed to catch on with the public. In 1885, the producers made a deal with inventor Thomas A. Edison to broadcast the show using a “vibrator magnet for induction transmissions,” but negotiations broke down when Edison attempted to patent the actors. However, with the licensing of the first commercial radio stations in 1920, most critics agree that Guiding Light had finally found its medium. In 1923, the now-familiar themes and characters began to coalesce when Louise Bunting joined the cast as matriarch Amanda Cooper Spaulding, a role she continues to play to this day, albeit from a glass sarcophagus
On June 30, 1952 the program transitioned to television, where it continued to make history. In 1966, Guiding Light introduced the first continuing African-American characters in a soap opera; in the 1980s, formerly taboo subjects such as teen pregnancy, AIDS, and sexual harassment were tackled; and for nearly eight months in 1998, all the male characters were played by the two guys from Puppetry of the Penis.
The final episode is scheduled to air on September 18, 2009.